With all due respect to that Iron Lady, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a woman I truly admire, human rights did not begin with the Magna Carta as she is quoted in yesterday's commemoration of the anniversary of the document by Robert Morrison.

A few thousand years before England's King John signed the Magna Carta against his will and the English were just another group of lawless, warring tribes, the Jews, former slaves who fled Egypt on their way to the Promised Land of Israel, willingly received the Torah at Sinai. Codified and interpreted by generations of rabbis, human rights were an integral way of life within Jewish communities, including those who lived in England in 1215 at the time of the signing of the Magna Carta.

And when 75 years later the generation following the one which forced the king to sign the Magna Carta expelled the Jews from England in 1290, the Jews still followed the precepts of their law, including respect for human rights.

Given the often brutal history of British imperialism, where the British ignored many of the fine precepts embedded in the Magna Carta, and the often cruelty of their class system perhaps the soon to come 800th anniversary of the document will spur them to remember and observe.

Ethel Fenig has a point but fails to mention or explain that human rights laws via the Torah were religious in orientation (i.e.: God’s recognition of inherent human rights) whereas the human rights laws issued or oriented with the Magna Carta were those set forth by man for all men to recognize and follow.

"Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution...[they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity...[we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King...it was not the sort of Revolution that France's was...'Liberty, equality, fraternity'  they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.

I concur. Accordingly, consider when secularism began taking root in countries and in international political interactions. The issue that I was alluding to was one between the roots of secularism and religion...i.e.: rights and laws given by God (Torah, etc.) and those given by man (Magna Carta, Constitution, etc.).

One of many intellectual/philosophical/theological pits yawning in any such discussionis the following.

Americans are sovereigns, all by themselves. True, they only rule themselves (lately, many seem to fail in even that!) but that is the essential difference between Americans and all other nations.

That is, arguably, the core and the source of American exceptionalism.

In America one finds both the most religious of developed nations and a population quite able to accept the last six of the Ten Commandments as obligatory while leaving the first four to the individual’s choice.

Therein is America’s strength, IMHO.

10
posted on 06/16/2010 8:59:15 AM PDT
by GladesGuru
(In a society predicated upon freedom, it is essential to examine principles,)

This is an old topic. Just adding to the catalog.

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